Mani,

Right after Q1 was introduced a few of us were seriously testing it and we were shouting to eachother to notch down after starting at the default of 14 (IIRC this was merely off line). At 4 things started to happen, and at 1 we were shouting things got wild and crazy. This was all in a time span of a week or so (slowly getting the grasp), and while at first being under 0 we were all impressed, we later all came back on that. Now, some 2 years further down the line, try violins. They don't work at these low levels. Things seem more detailed, but violins sound digital. Now :

I have always known (and told about it when it was necessary) that the values below 0 are special because they imply some randomness. And although I was talking into the blue to some extend, I knew about that randomness, that by itself creating a resonance. As you can see in the pictures where Q1=-4 is involved, you can clearly see it does something with a pattern of 3/100 of a second. How that sounds ? I guess more detail is perceived but in the end it sounds like more digital. Watch the violins.

Peter

Your both wish is my command ...
Below you see (don't look at the window title !) :

(1) 1st trace 4-0-0-0-0 Unattended compared to Foobar WASAPI;
(2) 2nd trace -4-0-0-0-0 Unattanded compared to Foobar WASAPI;
(3) 3rd trace 4-0-0-0-0 Unattended compared to -4-0-0-0-0 Unattended.

Sidenote : The white graphs are the transients, as taken from the first (left one) mentioned. Generally they are the same for each trace because it isn't about that. However, it may look logical that anomalies in the DAC are cause by high transients. I could not prove this though.

Some notices (beyond the pictures you see, so trust me) :

a. (2) and (3) seem to be of opposite phase, which most likely is because of different offsets used. Strange explanation, but right now I have no other. Otherwise (2) and (3) are very similar.
Try to imagine the phase-change-thing, and that the base of (2) and (3) is -4 vs. +4 (the left one mentioned is the base).

b. If you look very carefully at the first trace of the first picture below (Compare09) you see that where the mousepointer is a "1 cm" repeating pattern occurs throughout. This is fragile, and note you're looking at a time span of 20 seconds here !

c. Compare10 has zoomed in (time span is now near 2 seconds) and with some imagination you can still see the pattern in the first trace.

d. While both (2) and (3) incorporate Q1=-4, you can see it masks all, and makes comparisons worthless. Keep in mind this is my DAC !

e. Compare11 is generally showing that some consistent thing is going on in my DAC; Where the mousepointer shows, right below you see the same but expanded (this is Q1=-4 doing that !), while the third trace shows exactly the same though in opposite phase, but dead sure again Q1=-4 doing it. If you look closely at the (1), (2), (3) above, you see there is no common denominator (none of the three elements, -4, +4, Foobar is in each of them), so my DAC must be doing this by itself. However, it is emphasized or it is not (like in trace 1 it is not).

f. Knowing that Q1=4 seems more reliable, Compare12 the most clear shows that in between Q1=4 and Foobar a pattern is present. It is mild though.


In a year's time I may have more firm conclusions. Just learning here.

G'day Jeffc,

Bailing out, right ? just joking  of course ...

But is my conclusion right that you are using Engine#1 (and other players) to compare ? I think that is dangerous ... Or maybe just not for your purpose. E.g. :
Flac is known to (possibly) sound different because of the real time processing it takes to decompress it. Not exactly your example of course, but Engine#3 is known to take distance of that, because it pre-decompresses, and after that it's just wav-wav comparison.
The real merits are up to you here.

Just wanted to let you know before climbing from your laundry and join the lunatics on bailing out for another Woodstock.

Peter

1. Yes.

2. Yes.

3. Yes. Note that "off values" is the difference between two recordings. Only thourough analysis between different sets of comparisons may unveil which recording is really off, and from that may come which one is the most correct. Only if reasons can be found for seen off values, like the one from the last example and the time cursor, one comparison may be sufficient to declare one recording as being off in absolute sense. And also :


With the knowledge of the last picture, and without examining it again, I dare say that this too comes from the time cursor in Foobar.
So, once specifics are known and can be recognized, it becomes more and more easy to qualify what is happening in other situations. This will be a matter of experience.

Peter

Ok, I think I'll be spending the rest of my life analyzing this stuff. Look what I found now :

Below you see a comparison between Q1=4 Attended and Q1=-4 Unattended.
What you see could be explained as breaking up sound. The point here is that this is a comparison between Attended and Unattended, and what you see happens exactly each one second. What is the main difference between the two ? one of them moves a time cursor forward, once per second ...
It always takes 12/100 of a second before everything is in rest again. Edit : I don't know how I got the 12/100, but if I'm looking again this is around 7/10. Sorry. Edit2 : No, sorry again, but 12/100 is correct afterall.

Anything else ?

Yes Dave, and you can actually see that in both above pictures;

The red line is how things should be. Everything above it deviates to plus voltage, everything below it to minus. And since there are patterns, who knows how this is perceived. Oh, note you see one channel only.

I think I saw my DAC switches absolute phase, btw most do. So whatever you want to see in the above, think about that.

But it is a good remark/question about that phase thing Dave. I already forgot about it, did not look at these pictures with that in mind, but indeed below a certain setting of Q1 we have always felt "phase change". "We" = many.

Hi Jeffc,

You won't get many complaints in here for hearing these tings, although by now people may think you live in a tree.
But ok, once there was a time I came up with "software makes a difference", and at last that can be proven now.

Right now I don't see how your FLAC procedure can make a difference. At least not with XXHighEnd. But if it does, I think copying a WAV from one place to the other already will.
Btw, this has nothing to do with FLAC being losless or not, because it just is and it can easily be checked.
But give it a week or so, and you can test it yourself.

Peter

Well, I must say I'm a little proud on this. Long from finished, but here's something for :

05 is a part of 0.7 seconds from the difference between Q1 = 4 and Q1 = -4;

06 is a part of 0.3 seconds from the difference between Q1 = 4 and Q1 = 24.

Unattended, other Q sliders at 0.
Both snapshots are not throughout like that, but they are characteristics for the difference.

Let's assume we can hear this. Hahaha

I know. This is wrong for quite some months now. There was a time it worked.
I never got into it, since nobody complained about it.

Which ended today.

True ... 

Currently I am working on some nice graphing of it all, and then the real work starts ...
You know, this takes so crazy much time that I kind of hope for - all of us (who like to contribute) to make some "world map" of this all, so it can be determined what is right and what is wrong. I am sure this is related to the DAC as well, but since usually everbody agrees on the software influence in general (outside Q sliders) being better or being worse (whatever is/was actual), there's common denominators over DACs to find. It really can be interesting I think, with in the end a possible conclusion about what actually happens and/or whether it is jitter sipling through through everything. In any case, my SRC can't stop "it" and the results are the same with and without SRC (in the DAC which I can switch on/off).

But I also saw that the Fireface itself is more prone to being stable (immune) for these things. Yeah, a device we use for SPDIF passthrough, so we never tested that for software influence (at least I never did). The difference is : a direct data (Firewire) connection ...
or ... a better clock relation to the capturing section ...

Peter

Hi Mani, the only thing I like less is the "speakers".

Is it not working properly ?

Right, time to report a bit about this.

[Edit : I removed the pictures from this post, while the text was not changed accordingly]

First of all, the measurement equipment (officially there for these kind of things) brought nothing. I guess by now this a kind of known, partly (or mainly ?) because I ranted about it a bit elsewhere, and I seem to have one follower at least.
So, for weeks I have been thinking how to approach this, and while working on the "glitch" software two weeks back, I suddenly started to see some lights.
Two weeks later, which would be last Friday, the first part of a program to do it was ready, and this weekend I have been measuring and measuring and measuring. A brief view in the directory I use for it, shows that I took 133 recordings of an 80 second track, and below Compare01 may give an impression of what I compared.

The main conclusion is : oh yes, I can measure the difference !

The means used comes down to recording the music data from the analogue out from the DAC, and compare those recordings amongst eachother.
As you can see in Compare01 for each same version two recordings are taken, which is necessary for the interpretation of the correctness of the recording itself. More difficult to explain (so I won't even start that) but it is crazy difficult to obtain compareable recordings, which is related to offsets, sample rate and clock alignment(s). This summarized, it took me days already to get similar results from the same situations.

On a side note, keep in mind that for each difference measured, the bit perfectness is still obtained. This now can be checked by means of the same software very easily, with the setup of looping back the digital line into a digital in of the soundcard. This by itself is no exciting thing, but the fact that the same software is just, showing zero differences always, is a nice thing to know for good feelings (about some decent wat of working).

What do you see when the same settings are used ?

For XXHighEnd this would mean the same Q settings and all, and in general this is about comparing a player with itself, performing two runs with the same settings.

First let's see what's in that 80 seconds 16/44.1 file :
There are 80 x 44100 = 1,764,000 samples for one channel. Note all measurements are about one channel, which just is sufficient (for this purpose and for now).

To my findings so far, when a random *same* situation is compared, around 82% of the samples will be equal.
This means that for our example around 317520 samples are not equal.

Keep in mind that the maximum value in one sample (for one channel, 16 bits) is 65536, but that any situation which is officially equal will have a maximum off value in any sample of 1 (and more rarely 2). This gives an off value of 317520.
See below Compare02 for an example.

These ratios apply always and spring from general phenomena not under our control, but count for my DAC in this case. It will depend on things I currently don't know, but I have a most strong feeling somehow the clock of the DAC is influenced. I derive this from everything I saw at comparing and the patterns I saw. There is more to it though like the receiver chip, and of course jitter coming from the SPDIF connection I used.
If you take jitter as the example of something not being under our control (once the DAC is there), it is an explanation of not every run at comparing the exact same settings, ending up with the same figures. So keep in mind : at running the same settings, only 82% of samples will be the same, and the off value in one sample will be 1 only. I assume this is inaudible when you run a track twice, of which I just have proven it will not sound the same, because it just doesn't come out of the DAC the same.

What do you see when the settings are different ?

Simple : the percentage of samples being the same goes down, and the off value will rise. But there is a very profound other difference :
The off value per sample will be higher than 1 for many samples.
See below Compare03 for an example.

I'll spare you the longer list for now, but this is from a relatively mild difference in settings, and the percentage of samples the same dropped from 82% to 81% only, but the off value rased from 317520 to 361724.
This is a mild difference, but something more bad is going on : it happens in patterns. So what you see in Compare02 recurs throughout, and no matter how small the increase of the value per sample is, it recurs every few ms and it will imply an audble frequency by itself (think about dither and why it should be random and you'll understand).

Compare04 below shows a much more severe case;
Here the number of samples equal dropped to 40%, and the total off value rose to 1,980,277. This is not only because the spikes are deeper, but merely because of a more consistent off value, which you can see in the screenshot (the parts without spikes, but with a consistent +++ etc.).

Keep in mind : this is bit perfect.

I have seen cases comparable to Compare03 but worse, which are beyond my capability of explaining so far. There's rows and rows and rows with the value just being of in a rather consistent fashion. It seems that something can get confused and won't recover for a while. But, it always does ... until it happens again.

Not to forget : when I'm talking about things getting confused, this has to be seen in the context of the phenomenon happening, can be repeated over and over. With this I mean, that the specific comparison of two (settings) situations showing this, do not show when the two files recorded from that same setting causing it are compared. Then it's just the known 82% of samples being the same, the others being off by a value of 1 (and rarely 2).
So whatever it is causing this, just can be repeated. Of course this is just the Q settings, or the player for that matter.

Further explanation

I explained the above without all the context needed, thinking it would be more easy to grasp. But what actually is happening, is this :

If you look at the screenshots again (03 and 04) ... you see the relative difference between two recordings. Or in other words, you're not seeing the difference between the original source and the recording. It all is crazy difficult already, and that is just another step for me. Besides that, comparing with the original recording would be impossible with an oversampling DAC which changes the data in the first place (I tried it, around 1% of equal samples are left then). Comparing recordings each from the oversampling DAC, however, just works
So it is about relative differences ...

This means that the pattern I talked about, and that by itself turning into an audible frequency, may indeed be so, when the setting I used for the base coincidentally is the absolute correct one. And I don't know that ...
Keep in mind : whaver setting I use and take two recordings from, show the same "being good".

What it comes down to, is comparing many settings, and learn from the relative differences in between those. If A-B shows a pattern, but A-C shows another pattern which also shows at B-C, you can bet C is creating that pattern. Once this is known, it is a reference by itself.
From this kind of operating I learned that a very high Q1 value compares very much to a very low Q1 value, which btw was the very last I expected.

To end this for now : Foobar WASAPI shows a mild pattern compared with XXHighEnd WASAPI (Engine#3) just the same, when compared with XX-Q-4-0-0-0-0 (which seems safe). So far, I don't know whether Foobar creates that pattern, or XX does it. We only know XX sounds better, but we actually don't know whether that's because an unauthorised frequency riding on things. So now it becomes more complicated, and the Q sliders can be used to simulate something which is going on in Foobar. When the comparison shows the normal 82% and off value, we'd be listening to Foobar ...


 

But it's not quite finished.
Along with some other analysis stuff, for your benefit, it will be in 0.9y (will take a while !), although I guess some of it will be available in the licensed version only. Must see about that.

Peter

But can you please answer my question ? ...

Edit : I didn't ask for a particular track or album. You can pick what you like, as long as it is around 6 minutes.

With how many tracks in the Playlist is that ?

Thanks guys, but it doesn't help me ... Johan, your problem probably is there, but it is incurred for a slow(er) load speed, which I just have not. So I can't copy that. But it is (or seems) another problem anyway.

LydMekk, could you do me another favor;
Take a track of around 6 minutes, look how long it exactly is, start it, press a stopwatch or something when you hear the music start (have a track that starts rather sudden so you can hear it properly), and measure until the music stops (best again would be a clear ending).
Now please tell me how long that track should be accoring to the mm:ss it indicates, and how many seconds it is off (+ or -).

Thanks,
Peter

PS: By now I must have tried everything, but I can't let it happen. Anyone want to buy The Girl in The Other Room from me ? (or the first two tracks at least )